I have been asked this eleven times and I always say the same thing.
I had already cried. I did it in May, in a laundry room, with eleven towels folded on the dryer, and then again over the following few weeks, in the car, at red lights, which is where women my age do most of their crying.
By Thanksgiving there wasn’t anything left in that particular reservoir.
What I did that night instead was something much more useful, and much more boring, and it took me until one in the morning.
I Spent Thanksgiving Night Making Four Phone Calls and One List, and Everything That Followed Came Out of Those Five Things
Call one: my friend Delphine. The museum friend. Seventy-six years old, widowed, lives in a two-bedroom condo in a fifty-five-and-over community eleven minutes away.
